How many times have you said that? I’ve probably said it a hundred times. Blogging can be really hard for most of us. We all know how important it is for generating traffic to our site, but coming up with fresh ideas can be difficult. Google and the other search engines want a never-ending stream of fresh, original content but if you’re like me you feel like you’ve already said it all. What else is there to talk about? How do I keep coming up with new ideas for articles?
Blogging Ideas in Just One Click
Well, there is one tool that may be able to help. It’s not going to write your blog articles for you but it may help to spark some ideas and get your creative juices flowing. HubSpot, the inbound marketing experts, have created a blog topic generator that can give you “a week of blogging topics” based on a few keywords that you supply. Just enter up to 3 simple ideas (looking for nouns here) and their tool will spit out 5 potential titles that you can use as a starting point for writing your next blog article.
I put the tool to the test myself to see if it could help me. I entered blogging, fresh ideas, and original content as my keywords and here are the topics it came back with:
- 14 Common Misconceptions About Blogging
- 20 Myths About Fresh Ideas
- Things About Original Content Your Boss Wants to Know
- 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Blogging
- 15 Best Blogs to Follow About Fresh Ideas
Again, none of these are intended to be used as an actual working title. They’re just supposed to get you thinking. If you don’t find anything you think you can work with you can always hit the Try Again button and submit the same keywords over again to generate 5 new topics, or put in 3 new keywords.
It Ain’t Perfect, But It’s Free
If you use the tool a few times you’ll start to notice a theme to the titles. They all start sounding a bit similar after a while. The folks at HubSpot know their topic generator isn’t a magic bullet. They even say right on the page that “our algorithm isn’t perfect”. The system comes up with a lot of “top 10” style titles. I personally think these are great. They can be easier to write and people like lists because they tend to be quicker reads and they’re easy to digest. But I wouldn’t make that the only writing style I use on my blog if I were you. You should try to diversify your style to keep readers engaged.
But the tool will occasionally come back with a real winner. In fact, when I entered web design as one of my keywords it gave me this gem that I can’t wait to use:
